Cult Figures

By Arthur Lubow

Published: August 15, 2004

Correction Appended

On Sept. 29, 1999, in the Wan Chai neighborhood of Hong Kong, a line of people, snaking from the street to a fourth-floor showroom, awaited admission to an exhibition of 99 customized action figures by a young designer named Michael Lau. In the combustible world of Hong Kong trends, this was something seriously new. Transforming hard-plastic, 12-inch action figures into pop-culture icons -- that was a familiar pastime for Hong Kong toy collectors. It had even become a little boring.

But Lau's grown-up toys were different. Using bodies he scavenged from dolls like G.I. Joe and molding original heads, hands and feet out of hard plastic, Lau had created skateboarders, surfers and snowboarders, decked out in baggy shorts, camouflage jackets, tentlike sweatshirts and of-the-moment sneakers, adorned with chains, earrings and tattoos, their hair in dreadlocks or pressed beneath bright-colored caps. ''Street culture and hip-hop culture and skateboard style were coming up,'' Lau explained when I met with him not long ago in Hong Kong. ''The culture included fashion, music, graffiti. It seemed really fresh. It is just like a uniform -- people in Hong Kong and Tokyo and Britain and the States all look the same.'' Sharply observed, exuberantly imaginative, Lau's collection of 99 ''Gardeners'' (named for comic-strip characters that he created the year before) looked just like the local hipsters who were looking at them, or the way those people wanted to look.

Lau's 99 Gardeners inspired other Hong Kong comic-book illustrators, graphic designers and ad-agency artists to start making their own figures. While a few Japanese cult boutiques had previously issued some limited-edition collectible toys, the Hong Kong designers engendered a craze. Over the next five years, riding on the wings of the Internet, such ''toys,'' as their enthusiasts call them, spread from Hong Kong, first to Japan and then to the West. Typically issued in limited editions of a few hundred, these toys are meant not for play but for display. They are valuable enough that many buyers leave a new purchase untouched in its box, hoping to preserve its resale value, which for a sought-after toy can quickly double or triple on eBay. Prominent toy artists in Japan, the United States and Britain, as well as those in Hong Kong, attract devoted fans -- typically, young men in their 20's and 30's who are ready to plunk down $100 or $200 for a toy, a small fraction of the original cost.

At one of the main outlets for these limited-edition figures, the two-year-old Kidrobot, which has stores in San Francisco and New York, toys often sell out in a few days -- or a few hours. Limited editions in different colors, typically in runs of 100 to 500 units, can be made for particular countries or specific stores. The perception of scarcity fuels the designer-toy market. Savvy toy retailers know how important it is to heighten that anxiety, but they turn the pressure tactic into a game. ''There was one toy that was available only if it was raining out,'' explains Paul Budnitz, Kidrobot's president. ''Another toy was available on Mondays only. It makes it really fun. I suppose it is good marketing for everyone. Everything here sells out.''

Youth-oriented fashion and entertainment companies like Nike, Sony and Levi's picked up on the fad, sponsoring exhibitions and licensing the artists' figures. The trendsetting Paris fashion-and-design store Colette has staged two exhibitions of designer toys, the most recent in June. Over the summer, Visionaire, a New York art-and-fashion publication, mounted a gallery show of designer toys; it will devote a characteristically lavish issue to the subject in November, with dolls customized by fashion designers, including Karl Lagerfeld, Marc Jacobs and Dolce & Gabbana.

Grown-up toys are making it big. But the positioning of a factory-made toy as a limited-edition art object is a particularly delicate maneuver. For artists designing toys, commercial success is a potentially fatal problem.

A 34-year-old with a ponytail and the wispy suggestion of a goatee, Michael Lau looks like an artist, and he seems to think of himself as one too. Lau is one of six children born to a chicken farmer in Hong Kong's New Territories; the family later moved to a public housing project in the capital. They couldn't afford store-bought toys. ''I sculptured Yoda out of cheap soap or made furniture out of newspaper,'' he recalled, as we sat and talked in his apartment overlooking a soccer field. (He spoke to me in Cantonese, and his girlfriend, Mickey Cheng, acted as a translator.) A talented draftsman, he found work after graduating from high school as a retoucher in an oil-painting factory, as a window-display designer for a department store and, finally, as a ''visualizer'' at an advertising agency -- the person who converts a concept into a sketch or a storyboard.

The visualizer he replaced at the Japanese-owned agency was named Eric So, who had also grown up poor in Hong Kong. So and Lau shared an enthusiasm for G.I. Joe dolls. Customizing toys was pure play, a way of expressing artistic talents that they were pursuing more ambitiously by painting in acrylics. In 1996, each exhibited at the Hong Kong Arts Center. The next year, Lau won a drawing prize in Hong Kong for the most promising artist. His career was going well, but he couldn't tell where it was going. ''I am looking at so many references,'' he said. ''It is hard to be the best in any area. It is difficult to find a point to break through.'' Unexpectedly, playing with toys would become his vocation.

Arthur Lubow is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent article was about the New York Philharmonic.

Correction: August 29, 2004, Sunday Because of an editing error, an article on Aug. 15 about designer toys from Hong Kong and elsewhere misstated the relationship between the cost of manufacturing them and their retail price, $100 or more. The cost of making them is a small fraction of the sales price.